About a year ago, I wrote a long post about Text iQ, as I didn’t find Text iQ helpful (at all).

I’m going to give it another try, but I’m wondering if it has improved much? any?

I spent a fair amount of time giving a good faith effort to learn it and use it, but I always came to the same conclusion - - - the bubbles / sentiment / etc. isn’t really working for me. Even if it’s minimally helpful, I always told the stakeholder - “You still have to read all the comments carefully to best understand what the respondents are saying.”

I’m at a 4 year college, typically we get no more than 2,000 comments. That’s really not all that many, but still it’s like a weeks worth of work to give a close reading of the comments and do some amount of categorization.

An example of a text question we have is “What did you like least about your college experience?” Then they spill their guts, as it’s a loaded question. So both the computer and manual review is hard to try and categorize 500+ words. 

Another key objection is that Text iQ doesn’t understand our military jargon. I suppose machine learning can help, but the machine isn’t going to understand every acronym and language nuance. 

Here’s the excruciatingly long post about this from last year, if you care to glance at that, it has all of the points I wanted to make regarding our experience.

I’m going to start by digging into Basecamp on this and giving it another good faith effort. But appreciate any thoughts you have on the matter. I’m starting here.

Thank you.